Miss Bird's animated pages present so many delightful pictures of
mountain scenery that we know not which to choose in illustration of her
remarkable descriptive powers. We have already alluded to her faculty of
pictorial presentment; it is one in which few of her sex surpass her;
she puts a scene before us with as much life and distinctness as a
Constable or a Peter Graham, and the reader, who would form a clear and
well-defined conception of the Rocky Mountains in their picturesque
aspects, cannot do better than study her little but delightful book.
While reading it one seems to feel the pure, keen, mountain air around
one; to see the great peaks rising one above the other like the towers
and spires of some vast cathedral of nature; to watch the ever-shifting
phantasmagoria of gorgeous colour that rolls over the landscape from
sunrise to sunset, and in the hush of the moonlit night disappears
before the silver radiance of the nascent orb; to hear the fall of the
mountain streams, and to catch the breath of the fragrant wind that
comes from the pine-forest loaded with fragrance and freshness and
subtle odours.

Traversing Colorado, in the neighbourhood of the Plate River, she tells
us that she "rode up one great ascent, where hills were tumbled about
confusedly; and suddenly, across the broad ravine, above the sunny grass
and the deep-green pines, rose in glowing and shaded red against the
glittering blue heaven, a magnificent and unearthly range of mountains,
as shapely as could be seen, rising into colossal points, cleft by deep
blue ravines, broken up into shark's teeth, with gigantic knobs and
pinnacles rising from their inaccessible sides, very fair to look
upon--a glowing, heavenly, unforgettable sight, and only four miles off.
Mountains they looked not of this earth, but such as one sees in dreams
alone, the blessed ranges of 'the land which is very far off.' They were
more brilliant than those incredible colours in which painters array
the fiery hills of Moab and the Desert, and one could not believe them
for ever uninhabited, for on them rose, as in the East, the similitude
of stately fortresses, not the grey castellated towers of feudal Europe,
but gay, massive, Saracenic architecture, the outgrowth of the solid
rock. They were vast ranges, apparently of enormous height, their colour
indescribable, deepest and reddest near the pine-draped bases, then
gradually softening into wonderful tenderness, till the hig